The semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) industry has experienced rapid growth. Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generations of ICs where each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. In the course of IC evolution, functional density (i.e., the number of interconnected devices per chip area) has generally increased while geometric size (i.e., the smallest component that can be created using a fabrication process) has decreased. Such advances have increased the complexity of processing and manufacturing ICs. For these advances, similar developments in IC processing and manufacturing are needed.
Along with the advantages realized from reducing geometric size, improvements are being made directly to the IC devices. One such IC device is an image sensor device. An image sensor device includes a pixel array (or grid) for detecting light and recording intensity (brightness) of the detected light. The pixel array responds to the light by accumulating a charge. The higher the light intensity, the greater the charge that is accumulated in the pixel array. The accumulated charge is then used (for example, by other circuitry) to provide image information for use in a suitable application, such as a digital camera.
However, since the feature sizes continue to decrease, fabrication processes continue to become more difficult to perform. Therefore, it is a challenge to form reliable image sensor devices at smaller and smaller sizes.